


Threads

by steelneena



Series: CR 2 Oneshots and Short Series [29]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst?, Big spoilers for 112, Character Study, Dualities, Gen, Scry scene in depth, Some depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:00:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27050821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/pseuds/steelneena
Summary: “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”― JRR TolkienorA lavender tiefling considers the past, the present, and the future.
Relationships: Lucien & The Tombtakers (Critical Role), The Mighty Nein & Mollymauk Tealeaf
Series: CR 2 Oneshots and Short Series [29]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1280990
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35





	Threads

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR 112 SPOILERS
> 
> Inspired by Jester's 2nd Scry scene. Personally, I have NO idea just what configuration of individual is inside Schrödinger's Lavender Tiefling right now. This is just one possibility. I am married to none of them. I'm just along for the ride.

The tundra is harsh and uncompromising, not unlike the last several times that he made the journey to Eiselcross. The cold is bitter and unrelenting, the wind whips with a gale force, and when the sun sparkles on the snow and the air is clear and fresh, his sight is glared and his breaths come laboured. 

Nighttime is easier. For one, they hole up at night, hide within the cover of the various caves that dot the environs. There’s fire to be built, and no sweat gathered beneath layers of heavy garments to set a chill in the bones, and clouds to insulate the air, for what little that protection counts. 

One could die here, easily. It wouldn’t take much to pitch forward while slogging through the deep snow, frozen stiff. People die out there all the time. 

It’s funny - but he doesn’t laugh. Once, maybe, he would have, but not now. That’s twice now, that he’s been beneath the ground, bloodied and broken and breathless. Twice that he’s fallen. Twice that he’s risen. 

Two times too many. 

Once, he’d have laughed in the face of danger; now, despite their goal, despite the end - or is it the beginning? - finally in sight, laughter seems a fool’s errand. 

And if what fools get is dead, then he’s not sure he wants to be that fool again. 

Either of them. 

Ambition had fueled him once, and bravery the next, but caution is something he cannot afford to ignore. 

The rest of them, surprisingly, are just as foolish as ever. They take his smiles and eat them up, his speeches of perseverance, his visions of the grand future they will usher forward. They still look at him with eyes wide, though this time he didn’t manage to resurrect himself. Maybe it’s because he was the one who died. They moved on because he’d told them to, after all. But they’d still been waiting - hoping, _praying_ \- that he’d return. 

That they might pick up where they left off. 

How does one pick up the threads of an old life? Disparate components, fabrics mismatched and loosely held together with the most meagre of stitches, he contemplates. Which life, even, is it? 

The life where he led impassioned people into a new era? The life where he gave his own for people he hardly knew? 

As he tears a strip of jerky away, chewing thoughtfully, he considers the faces of those sleeping in a circle around the fire. Tyffial. Otis. Zoran. Cree.

Jurrell is gone - has been gone - and a part of him mourns that loss, and will forever. What right has he to return when Jurrell remains moldering and rotten beneath the earth? Once, he’d never have contemplated the fairness of such a thing. Once, it would have been understood. To the others, he is the only one who is irreplaceable. To the others, he is the only one whose continued existence matters. A strange thought. Cree, he’s known more than half his life. Tyffial and Zoran nearly as long, and even though Otis had come later, he matters no less. Jurrell had been devoted to the cause, faithful to a fault. And how had that loyalty been rewarded? How could he allow them to continue thinking themselves so unimportant?

Without them…

Well, alone in the flickering firelight, he doesn't want to contemplate where he would be without them. 

(Buried in a shallow grave, rotting just like Jurrell.)

Comparatively, he’d know the others little more than a month, save Yasha. And yet, somehow, he’d seen fit to die for Beau. To take the glaive, to be speared open, chest cracked like a walnut shell, carved out and left empty.

Again, he looks to the faces of his sleeping companions, eyes shuttered in peacefulness, and imagines each one sprayed with blood, battered, beaten, slain. 

Would he have died for them before? They’d have died for him, if they’d have been able. Would still. He knows that much. It is undeniable. But would he have seen fit to lay down his own life? 

No. 

Now, he’s not so sure. 

Now, he’s not so sure about anything anymore. 

Certainty is a luxury he can no longer afford. Certainty is ignorance and ignorance is bliss and bliss is foolish optimism and youthful arrogance, all the things the many people he has called his friends want him to be. 

All the things he wishes he could still have. 

All the things he can no longer afford to be. 

Sliding his hand beneath the furs, he presses his fingers to the parchment, thin and torn, illegible and muddied. Regardless of the fact that whatever had been written on it was long lost, it means _something_ that it is there at all. _Someone_ left it for him. The Nein had survived - he knows that much, as Cree had explained, perhaps reluctantly, that they were the only reason she’d known where to look, how to get him. So they’d lived, buried him and eventually returned to the Gentleman. That much is evident. 

There have been a few opportunities, moments like the flash of a streaking star through the black veil of night, where he could have asked after them, could have inquired, but hadn’t. Fear, somehow, flooded his throat. Though what for, he isn’t sure. Some part of him understands that they care for him, logically. That at the very least, Yasha loves him with the same devotion - though more unconditionally, perhaps - that Cree and the others do. But once, he’d derided the people who had left him lying in a grave; somehow, he’d ended up there again, all the same. Perhaps it hadn’t been the people he was with at all. 

Perhaps the problem has always been - would _always be_ \- him. 

He is, after all, the common denominator in the equation. 

And it had been him. Somehow, someway. Different, but not unrecognizable. And now, mashed together, these mismatched pieces of his history form an irrevocable whole; he will have to reconcile them somehow. 

This is he knows.

Hunching in - for _warmth_ , _just_ for warmth - he stares further into the fire. Immutable, unknowable, as impermeable as the far flung future or the misted past, as inconceivable as the grand expanse of the Astral Sea. It is better than spending too much time looking within, at the nooks and corners he’s carved into himself anew, or the mirrors which show the rebellions of his second self, his individuality, flagrant in the face of his duality. 

A farce. A dream. A last resort born of desperation and fear.

 _You have a choice_ , the voice of that self wants to whisper. And all of him wants to listen, but reality is as harsh and unforgiving as the snow capped desert that stretches out endlessly around them.

Avoidance is just as great a crime as arrogance. 

_See it through_ , the other voice counters. _See it through. End it._

_Be free._

Outside the cave, the wind continues to howl. The furs drift with a stray burst of a wind. 

Inside his mind, the war rages on. 


End file.
